Showing blog posts tagged with Berger-Marks Foundation

The Berger-Marks Foundation, which helps organize women into unions, gives out the Edna Award and Kate Mullany Courageous Young Worker Award each year to recognize young women active in labor and social justice work. The deadline for nominations for this year's awards is Friday, July 24, before midnight ET. The winners will be honored at an event in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 12.

January is National Mentoring Month, and our friends at the Berger-Marks Foundation are highlighting the mentoring program that New York City Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 3 shop steward Erin Sullivan helped establish in the 11,000 member local in 2011.

The managing director of United We Dream, Cristina Jimenez, won the 2014 Edna Award, which honors women ages 35 or younger who are leaders in the social justice movement. The award, which comes with a $10,000 prize, is named for Edna Berger, the first woman organizer of The Newspaper Guild. Jimenez was an important leader in the fight that led to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

A new report, Women’s Committees in Worker Organizations: Still Making a Difference, by Lois S. Gray and Maria Figueroa, concludes that labor organizations still have a need for women-centered programs and committees. Female union members and the labor unions themselves still gain significant benefits from maintaining internal organizations and programs for women. Gray and Figueroa collected data from both national and local unions, as well as alt labor groups. They found that such programs, even in female-dominant unions or those headed by women, increase women's union activism, develop leaders, expand collective bargaining and help address issues like sexual harassment and pay inequality.

The Edna Award, which carries a $10,000 prize, honors women age 35 or younger who have distinguished themselves as leaders of the social justice movement. It is named after Edna Berger, the first woman organizer of The Newspaper Guild-CWA and the inspiration behind the Berger-Marks Foundation.

The deadline for the 2013 Berger-Marks Foundation Edna Award is Aug. 16. The award recognizes a young woman who has made an extraordinary contribution to social justice and to improving the lives of working women and men.

The Labor Innovation Fund for the Twenty-First Century, aka LIFT, a collaborative project of the AFL-CIO with the Ford Foundation, the Solidago Foundation and the New World Foundation, was recently highlighted by the Berger-Marks Foundation. LIFT gives grants to partnership projects, “conversations around common agendas," and other efforts to link the union movement with community organizing focused on workers’ rights, decent jobs and a fair economy.